While Tam went over her new program with Jim Bob, pointing out her special features, Henderson and I found ourselves at reasonably loose ends. We sat around drinking green tea (God, how I came to hate that stuff) and puzzling how we'd all managed to get into such a mess. The major plus, however, was that we finally had Matsuo Noda by the short and curlies.
Or so we hoped. The problem was, he'd been a player longer than any of us, and he'd already demonstrated plenty of stamina. How would he counterattack? The question wasn't if, it was when. For the moment, though, we seemed to be on our way with clear sailing; in fact, the communications link with Kyoto was entirely empty. Tanaka also had clammed up, refusing to talk—beyond a rather firm prediction that our wholesale divestiture of DNI's assets was an insane act doomed to failure. I might also add he didn't appear nearly as concerned as the circumstances would seem to merit. In fact, he was so complacent I started getting a little uneasy. Finally Bill and I ran his prediction past young Jim Bob. Could somebody get through to Tam's program and devise a way to shut us down?
Henderson's increasingly glassy-eyed protege took out enough time from popping "uppers" and swilling Coors to assure us to the contrary.
"Hell, no way you could stop what we're settin' up here. We got ourselves what you call a closed system. Everything's
going to be handled by that green-eyed monster over there in the corner. We got these numbered brokerage accounts all over the place. Zip, in go the sell orders; zap, out go confirmations. And since none of the cash sits around, our bank accounts are all just gonna churn. We'll have billions of buckaroos rollin' at the speed of light. Ain't nobody gonna be able to get a bead on the action, take my word for it."
Our computer-generated buying and selling, he went on to declare, was conveniently similar in appearance to the "program" trading of the big institutional investors, the arbitrage players who routinely sold millions of dollars of securities in minutes using computers. Thanks to them, the market these days had been conditioned to accept huge, unaccountable trades as part of the territory. If somebody dumped massive blocks of stock unexpectedly, it could mean anything—such as, the spread between those stocks' prices and some "index future" had gotten momentarily out of sync. Shuffling securities like poker chips was the name of the game on the Street these days, so nobody would really notice or care. The turnover we'd be generating would merely suggest to the market that various investment-house arbitrage desks were unwinding positions.
What the heck, I said to Tam, maybe we could unload the better part of DNI's holdings before Noda struck back. The real key to our attack on Dai Nippon, however, depended on what happened to that cash after we turned it around. When I mentioned that, she just crossed her fingers.
By late Sunday night the DNI offices were a clutter of empty Chinese take-out containers, Kentucky Fried Chicken boxes, and computer printouts. However, Jim Bob claimed the system looked like a go. He'd completed a long sequence of test runs, and he was predicting he could probably swing at least four billion the first day, something in the nature of a warm-up for grander things to come.
Jim Bob, I should say, was fully as efficient as advertised by Henderson. Even if he was now flying higher than a moon shot, thanks to all the pills. He worked methodically, carefully analyzing the program at every step, double-checking the codes, poring over his verification printouts for obscure glitches. Mainly, though, he kept one unfocused eye on the clock, saying he always delivered on time. Point of honor.
Thus it was that, when Monday morning rolled around, we